Black Colleges Support Katrina Victims
Sacramento Observer, News Report, Antonio R. Harvey, Posted: Oct 17, 2005
Across the board, Hurricane Katrina impacted many of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in many ways.
U-CAN President and founder Alan Rowe (left) and Dr. Gayla Thomas discuss how to raise more funding for California students who attend HBCUs.
Whether they were hit by the devastating hurricane or not, most campuses extended their support to colleges that had to shut down immediately and suspend classes for the fall semester.
One of the Black campuses is Texas Southern, which opened its doors to 1,000 students and also offered to hire evacuees from those universities.
Gayla Thomas, the senior vice president of Enrollment Management and Planning, who was able to leave Houston, Texas to attend the United College Action Network’s Recruiters’ Fair in Sacramento recently, knows the situation first hand.
“We have adjusted to their circumstances,” Thomas said of flood evacuees who were transported to TSU. “As you know, Houston is the hub for a lot of relief efforts, and (Texas Southern is going to provide book vouchers, dormitory space for some (displaced) students, and apartments.”
Hampered by flooding, the city of New Orleans’ Xavier University, Southern University and Dillard University are among colleges closed until further notice.
Thomas, who has been monitoring the efforts around the Houston area, indicated that a majority of the students that transferred to TSU temporarily are pharmacy students. Overall, TSU has more than 10,000 students on campus.
We are the second largest producer of minority pharmacists in the country,” Thomas said.
She also said that most of the students affected by the evacuation are still having a hard time dealing with the situation.
“It’s been a great range of emotions for students,” Thomas said of traumatized students. “They are still in shock. Some of them couldn’t bring closure at this point.”
Texas Southern wasn’t the only campus to take in evacuee students. The University of Houston accepted 1,000 students, and Rice took just under a 100.
“Overall,” Thomas said, “I think there was a lot of human kindness and compassion.”
On another note, Dr. Thomas and U-CAN President and founder Alan Rowe, were examining other ways to help California students afford out-of-state fees to attend Black colleges and universities. In Sacramento, the two spoke to a business and civic leaders on how the program could if adopted by most campuses.
“We are just exploring the opportunities,” Thomas said. “We just want to start dialogue to see how we can take this to start helping students. Out of state students have the hardest time, financially, at Black schools.”
Rowe said TSU has a splendid track record of students from California, but some pupils with hopes and dreams fall through the cracks due to personal funding.
“Right now, we have 100 students at TSU that we can identify,” Rowe said. “The challenge is that we have problems when parents cannot get past the first two semesters. So we need to find ways to increase more funding for students.”
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